"Cover me!"
It's a shout we all know well on the Airsoft field. Someone is planning to make their move and hopefully push your team's front line forwards, or is about to make a dash towards the objective, and needs the rest of the team to give them covering fire as they advance.
But, what is covering fire? The simple answer most would give is: shooting at the enemy while your team mate advances so they're not advancing unsupported.
This isn't wrong in simple terms, but providing effective covering fire, known in military circles as suppression, is more involved than that, and if done poorly will fail to provide your team mate with the cover they're asking for as they advance, and puts them at high risk of being taken out by the enemy anyway.
So let's talk about how to set up a good suppressive fire cover for your team mates.
Know The Enemy
First thing's first: you need to know where the enemy are shooting from. Simply firing BBs down range at random won't do, because it won't suppress your enemy if the BBs aren't even landing anywhere near them in the first place. Would you duck for cover if the person shooting at you was missing you by miles? Of course not! Neither will the enemy.
Before sending any of your team mates into the open, identify the enemy positions. Take a few seconds to survey the battlefield and identify where the enemy actually are, and communicate that to your team. Anyone giving suppressive fire must know where they're shooting in order to effectively suppress the enemy positions.
For the best results, if you have a squad with decent organisation with you, designate targets: give each of your team mates a specific enemy position to suppress. This minimises the risk that, by sheer chance, there's an enemy out there that absolutely no one shoots at, and they've then got all the time in the world to line up a shot on your team mate as they make their move.
Shoot First, Dash Second
We've all seen it in the movies, where the hero bravely breaks out from cover and rushes across the battlefield, while bullets and rockets fly overhead into the enemy positions. The hero makes it through the storm alive, diving into cover at their new position.
In reality, the hero would probably be dead shortly after leaving cover.
Why?
The enemy weren't actually suppressed when the hero made themselves a target! They were still pointing their guns down range and could still return fire before taking cover.
The biggest mistake people make when asking for covering fire is setting off running towards their objective before giving anyone the chance to actually get the suppression going for them!
Make sure to give the players covering you some time to get the enemy ducking into cover before you move out of your own cover, otherwise the enemy might get a few BBs flying towards you before they're either taken out or duck out of harm's way, and then you're dead too.
Keep Their Heads Down
Next up in common mistakes is how the players giving covering fire accomplish it. It's important to know that, when suppressing for someone, you are not trying to score kills!
It's true, even if it seems counter-intuitive. What you're trying to do is make sure none of the enemy can point their gun at the person you're covering for. That means 100% of your BBs are probably going to miss, because you're shooting at someone you can't actually hit, but you're doing it on purpose.
Consider it from your end: you're behind a barricade or next to a window, and you can hear BBs hitting that barricade or can see them flying through that window constantly. You're not going to pop your head out, are you? You're going to wait for a gap in the incoming BBs before that, because if you stick your head up now you're almost certainly going to get hit by one (or more!) of those BBs.
Well, you can consider yourself suppressed!
Suppression isn't about scoring kills, it's all about keeping the enemy's heads firmly down, behind cover, so none of them get the opportunity to take a shot at whoever you're covering for. While you're ducked down behind that barricade or window, someone on the enemy team was making a dash across open ground and you couldn't do anything about it.
As such, your objective here is to keep shooting at where the enemy are, even if you can't see them, so they don't come back out from cover. Do not wait until you can see them, do not stop shooting to see if you can trick anyone into showing themselves, do not shift targets if you think you can score a kill elsewhere. People are depending on you to keep the enemy behind that cover, so the enemy can't shoot back.
Keeping it Up
Lastly, you need to make sure you're suppressing for the right length of time. Suppression, done right, is ammunition-hungry: you're putting out a lot of rounds so the enemy players don't want to consider trying their luck with popping up to shoot back at you. You can quickly run through a magazine while doing suppression, and it's for that reason having drum mags or box mags really helps for the suppression aficionado. In the real world, belt-fed machine guns are considered ideal for this role as they have hundreds of rounds in a belt, versus only 30 rounds in a standard rifle magazine.
Suppress for too long, and you're eating through ammunition for an effect that's not necessary: suppressing the enemy when no one needs them suppressed is just wasting ammunition to score no kills, after all.
Suppress for too little, and you leave your team mates exposed in potentially vulnerable positions. Consider what your team mate wants to do and how long they need covered for it: are they pushing to the next barricade? Once they've made it, you can stop.
Are they grabbing something and want to come back once they have it? You need to keep up the shooting until they're safely back in your lines. If you stop the shooting when they pick the objective up, they might not make it back to you alive!
Good Suppression Saves Lives
So always remember:
1. Fire for effect, not for kills. Keep the enemy hiding in cover, the best suppression scores zero kills because no one's willing to show themselves.
2. Get suppression established first, and get moving second. Running into the open before suppression is established gets you killed.
3. Maintain that fire superiority for as long as your team mates need to accomplish their objective.
Get these three things correct and you'll find your ability to establish good covering fire increases massively, and your team's ability to get things done in the face of the enemy improves dramatically as a result.
Have you mastered good suppressive fire? Try incorporating it into some small unit tactics that will make your team deadlier in the field!
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